Communicating psychology to policy, what's the problem?
In an analysis of the barriers to communicating psychological science to policymakers, Ferguson (2015, p.547) goes as far to say that, ‘everybody knows psychology is not a real science’. This feeling of being an inferior science is echoed in a collection of interviews with academics, journalists and science media specialists in the British Psychological Society (BPS) publication, The Psychologist (Rhodes, 2016). In one, Professor Chambers suggests that the media perceive psychology as the court jester of the sciences. In another, Professor Banyard suggests that the natural sciences can more clearly provide testable hypotheses and uncover reliable mechanisms, whilst psychological knowledge remains subjective, context dependent and changeable.
In this article, I question the assertion that the most pertinent barrier to effective psychology-policy communication is low public confidence in psychology, stemming from within house difficulties such as the replication crisis and questionable research practices. I propose that communication is poor where there is a more fundamental disconnect between the aims of psychologists and policymakers. In particular, there is a level of incompatibility between psychologists’ endeavour to understand behaviour and policymakers’ role of affecting behaviour, and a disconnect between conducting objective science and engaging in political advocacy.